We had quite the storm overnight. Thunder, lightning, rain, and hail. The hail woke me up with loud rumbling on the roof. I went to look out at the back deck where there was a carpet of it. All larger than a dime but smaller than a quarter, maybe 20 mm or so.

This morning, the damage it did to our cherry tomatoes and hops:

It’s cool and windy today, very fall-like. It seemed like just last week it was summer, hot and stormy. Hey, wait a minute, it was just last week.

There’s a semi-common Minnesota quip:

Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.

There’s a lot of truth to the quip. Perhaps the most extreme version of it that I’ve seen was a few summers ago. I’d taken a staycation, a week of use it or lose it vacation. My wife was working at her office and I was mostly goofing off, with a bit of puttering around the yard in the mix. It was a beautiful day but the forecast was for a big thunderstorm soon.

So I decided to drive to Canterbury Park for a bit of low-stakes poker. Got into my car and headed up to the T intersection at the end of the block. Like the moderately-safe driver I am, looked both ways before taking a left to head south for poker.

Look to the left. Bright, sunny, no wind, almost idyllic.

Look to the right. A vision into Hell. Black sky, swirling tree branches, torrential downpour.

Look back to the left. Go!

I guess I’d never realized that “a front coming through” could be such a literal line. If I thought about it at all, it was as a transitional area. Cold front on one side, warm front on the other. But not in this case; it was a clear cut delineation.

I was driving on a residential street with a 30 MPH speed limit initially, and 45 after crossing the nearby county line. But I would have had to be driving even faster than that to keep ahead of The Beast. Within a minute, I was driving through rain. Within three, it was raining so heavily that I could barely see the road, even with the wipers set to their fastest speed. I pulled off onto a side street, stopped the car, and turned on the radio. Joy of joys, a tornado warning.

Just another day in Minnesota.